Are Your Practice’s Marketing Initiatives Retrieving New Patients?

If you are not sure, Iconic Orange and our Patient Retriever “CJ” can provide just the assessment you need to know for sure!

Marketing your dental practice can sometimes feel like an unending cycle of ups and downs. Your practice spends time and money developing and placing an ad or sending a direct mailer to potential patient prospects, and you may get some response, but is it the response you expected? How about your website? Have you recently developed new content or launched your practice’s new website? If so, do you have any idea of how many new potential patients you have obtained from your website?If not, maybe it’s time to ask CJ for assistance.

AtIconic Orange, we understand exactly what it takes to engage with prospective new patients and how-to engagement with them to ensure not only new appointments but increase procedure acceptance. We also understand how difficult it is for dental practices to provide the consistency required to increase the number or patients and procedures performed. You see, you and your staff are experts at diagnosing and treating your patients to ensure they have healthy smiles, but how experienced are you or your staff at marketing your practice? Is the cost your spending on having office staff developing marketing campaigns and providing patient communication actually costing you more than you realize?

Iconic Orange’s Premier Patient Experience Programwas developed specifically for dental practices and is customized to each and every practice’s needs and branding guidelines. Our patient retriever, CJ is dedicated to analyzing your current marketing processes and has the expertise to provide your practice with a detailed analysis of how effective your current marketing processes are performing, how potential patients view your practice prior to engaging, and how well your practice stands up against other practices in your geographic location.

Why continue spending additional dollars having your dental office staff creating, implementing, and communicating on your behalf when their expertise can be utilized best on what they do best – providing the premier patient experience throughout the engagement process and beyond?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a consistent marketing strategy and a tactical plan in place that could break this boom-or-bust cycle? Your marketing efforts should never be a rushed reaction, but instead an ongoing effort to ensure you don’t experience the ebbs and flows of organic growth and procedure acceptance rates.

To Be a Premier Practice, You Must Start Off on the Right Track!

There are so many marketing options for dental practices today – advertising, direct mail, website lead generation, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, billboards, radio or television, patient or practice referral programs, open houses or events, sponsoring local events, attending or participating in local dental study clubs, using ‘out of the box’ templates for graphics and content development, and much more…. So, which of these are going to be the best fit for your practice, or better yet, fall in line with the marketing budget allocated for acquiring new patients?

Our Premier Patient Experience Consultation Program will be the first step in identifying what will work best and how to effectively execute new marketing initiatives on a consistent basis and at a price point that is actually palatable.

So, what makes Iconic Orange’s program different than the others? Well for one, we are not afraid of engaging directly with you and your staff, or better yet, providing suggestions or recommendations without a long-term commitment from your practice. And to prove our dedication here is one suggestion that is easy to implement, inexpensive to develop and implement, and provides ‘patient approved and treatment accepted’ credibility to prospective patients that you have not even thought about engaging with currently. This program is specifically developed to utilize your Patients and Fans as your greatest marketing asset!

You see, we live in a world of nonstop advertising. It’s become a part of nearly every one of our day-to-day activities. Consumers are spending more time ever with television and social media, the number of marketing messages a potential patient is exposed to every day is in the thousands. The vast majority of advertising received is “interruption marketing” marketing that they never asked to see – they interrupt their shows, music, and social media feed, keeping them from actually viewing the content they are actually seeking.

So, is it possible to effectively promote your dental practice on ad-saturated platforms like your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages? Can your practice create social media content that current or prospective patients will actually be welcome to see instead of ignoring? Yes, but the key to success is not using your staff or content creators posting it but instead using your patients and fans to do so on your behalf.

A Premier Patient Experience is engaging with your current patients and fans the way they want to engage. While it takes consistency to maintain the patient experience, once your staff is demonstrating your practice’s culture from the first point of engagement to the last, patients will want to share this with their experience with their friends and family, which ultimately delivers their perception of your practice directly to the people who would most likely become new patients of your practice.

Basically, when it comes down to it, the simplest patient post is better marketing for your practice than the cleverest social media content you could develop internally.

So, how do you actually get patients and fans to post on your practice’s behalf? A patient post is essentially their stamp of approval, and most patients are careful with which businesses they endorse on social media. As with all positive “word-of-mouth” exposure, your practice has to earn that approval. That starts with creating a patient experience that is so remarkable that they can’t resist sharing. Many practices start by developing a patient referral program that “they” think will engage and incentive their patients to participate.

There are many types of services out there offering to assist you with creating the best “patient referral program,” and all of them will be a bit unique, but these programs are specifically developed to tempt you to buy in immediately. They are using “out-of-box” marketing methodology that works most effectively for ALL dental practices, but that’s just it – ALL, not yours specifically. Your practice is unique from all others – your practice has its unique culture, staff, and patient engagement processes that is different from all the rest. After all, your practice is unique because you and your expertise make it unique. No other practice has “you”, so using that one differentiator is just what is needed to create the premier patient engagement.

So, why “buy in” to a program that isn’t developed specifically for your practice when there are so many other options available? While you do need some sort of referral program in place, it should be something you and your staff will be enthusiastic about and promote at all patient touch points. It should be a program that will appeal to your practice’s “ideal patient”. Instead of incorporating a cookie-cutter approach rarely produces quality results develop a program that is unique to your practice. By taking the time to develop this program, you will bring in the patients that will be ideal for your practice, otherwise, you may end up bringing in people who won’t are “not ideal” for your practice. In this case, no matter how great the program may be, in the end it may become a patient referral program that is more trouble than it’s worth.

Make Sure Your Practice is “Top-of-Mind”!

Your marketing approach should encourage top-of-mind awareness through a premier patient experience. A lot of people put off finding a dentist until they desperately need one. When that happens, you want your practice to be top of mind. You will achieve just this if your patients are sharing their experience at your practice first-hand. This starts by gaining approval from your patient.

Effective patient approval requires a team effort that is rewarding and fun. Developing an organized approach with a specific goal in mind can rally your entire internal team to create the premier patient experience. Introducing them to a simple “social media patient referral program” will not only provide personal engagement between your staff and the patient but will promote your patient’s willingness to participate and share, rather than passively following your practice’s social media platform pages.

Iconic Orange has vast experience in developing such a program, but here are the elements that are vital to ensuring your program’s success if you wish to develop one with your staff directly:

Keep all content fun and lighthearted. Social media platform pages are not meant to be dental journals for your practice, but instead connect with others, providing relevant content with the right dash of dentistry

Make sure all social media posts have a personal touch. Even if you are simply sharing an article or general oral health tips, provide a few sentences as to why you believe this is important for your fans

Encourage all internal staff to share how much they love working with you on their own personal social media pages, as they too have connections to potential new patients

Never forget the human element… Spotlight team members regularly. You can do this with photos, quick audio spotlight interviews or even video. Let your patients and their contacts know how much you and your staff enjoy practicing dental every day and how much you all enjoy working together

“Tell your own practices story” – instead of sharing dry dental expertise, focus on the bigger picture by sharing any and all involvement you or your staff are involved within your community. For instance, your team is participating in the annual “Dental Health Awareness Fun Run”, share pictures or quotes about how you prepared for the run, encourage patients to join your practice’s team, let your patients and all prospective patients know why supporting this organization is important to you personally, or one of your staff. This personal element will allow a sneak peek into the culture of your practice

Integrating more traditional marketing techniques, especially if you’re in a smaller city or town, can also help get people aware of — and forming a good impression of — your practice. Sharing your support of a community event or cross-promoting are other ways to get your practice’s name in from of people who could be ideal patients. This means proactively collecting the event’s social media hashtags and utilizing those tags when posting directly on your social media pages

In closing, there is a huge growth opportunity for dental practices today, as dental health is now a proven part over a patient’s overall health and wellness program. The question is, whether your practice is visible, engaging, patient approved and provides the patient experience that makes visiting the dentist positive. If you are still not sure, sign up for our dental marketing consultation program, or better yet, just reach out to us directly. We are always open to discussing how to support your practice’s marketing efforts and gain satisfaction that your practice has new patients calling or coming in the door more often than ever before!

Remember,Iconic Orange’s Premier Patient Experience Consultation Program is ‘CJ Tested and Approved’! He is here, with the support of the team at Iconic Orange, to start retrieving new patients for your practice today!